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A tunnel past Stonehenge will be dug largely along the route of the existing A303, the government has announced.

I mean, why?

Seriously, why?

There have been proposals for a bypass that would take the main A303 trunk route well away from the Stonehenge site, allowing for a modern dual carriageway that the road desperately needs while the current road could remain with much reduced local traffic.

Why on earth are they spending a fortune on a giant tunnel with all the future maintenance costs? Not to mention the hidden archeology that could be destroyed. I just can't figure for whose benefit this decision has been made. Certainly not motorists heading from London to Cornwall who would be much better served by a bypass.

Its supporters claim that critics have only just discovered their hatred of shadowy legislative mechanisms. After all, EU laws were regularly put straight on the statute book, either by being mainlined as an EU regulation or stitched-in as a directive.

This is the type of argument they use in school debating societies - one with superficial appeal but no substance. The reason those laws employed statutory instruments is because these were policy areas where the UK had agreed to pool sovereignty with Europe. The debates and the scrutiny had therefore taken place in Brussels. The legislation had been proposed by the Commission and then scrutinised by the European parliament, which is made up of MEPs directly elected by British and other European citizens, and the Council, which is made up of ministers and leaders from the elected parties of Britain and the rest of Europe.

To compare that with the grotty power-grab of a minority government in Westminster, staying in power via a shadowy deal with the DUP - which itself has not received parliamentary assent - and empowering ministers to make them into little Cadbury Mini Egg dictators, is laughable, dimwitted and profoundly cynical.

Andrew Sparrow at the G liveblog also has some good stuff, including the amendments to watch out for.

Let's have something different if we've got to do this thingAll the good socialist parts of contemporary CubaStudy medicine or carpentry in the morning and work in the fields in the afternoongo to sleep when it gets darkget up when it's light

He [Philip Hammond] said Dover would not be able to cope if it had to start imposing customs checks from March 2019. Explaining why it was preferable to have a transition deal that involved no new customs checks at the EU border (ie, something akin to be being in the customs union), he said Dover would struggle even if it only had to carry out relatively quick checks. (Politics Live, Guardian)

So the enormity of it all is sinking in?

Edited to add -

Although, if I must, to be fair to Philip Hammond he's always said he had an inkling . . .

Last edited by PorFavor on Tue 12 Sep, 2017 6:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Anguilla’s ex-attorney general says UK government may fear exposing its role in Caribbean territories’ tax arrangements

Aid offered by the British government to its hurricane-battered territories in the Caribbean has been dismissed as “derisory” by a former attorney general of one of the worst-hit islands.

Rupert Jones, who completed a two-year posting to Anguilla last year, suggested the government’s reluctance to commit significant aid may be motivated by embarrassment over its role in sustaining tax havens in the region.

He pointed out that the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, who is expected to travel to Anguilla to highlight British aid efforts, had indicated that £28m of the aid had already been spent. “Are we to believe it will only release a further £4m? This would be derisory – it would not even pay to rebuild one school,” Jones wrote. (Guardian)

Conservatives think they are civilised because they know how to pronounce Magdalene, as in Oxford or Cambridge, as “mawd-lin”; and they don’t feel weird saying the word “cummerbund”. But, just because they have minions carrying out their orders, that doesn’t elevate them above the ugly consequences of their vicious decisions. Doubling homelessness was a choice, the freezing weather will soon be here and more vulnerable people will die on our streets as a direct result of even colder-hearted decisions made by Conservative ministers. Maybe it’s just me, but I think leaving people to die is very, very rude."

Yet Labour MP Laura Pidcock was lambasted for saying that she could not be friends with the Conservatives who make these choices, as if she was the one who had somehow crossed a moral line. As if it’s all just a university debating club and parliamentarians of all sides are supposed to stagger out of Westminster restaurants laughing and joshing together; “Oh look, David, Theresa; did you put all those homeless people in that doorway? What are you guys like? Bedroom tax? Oh Iain, you’re trouble, you are! Cutting disability benefits? Damian, you’re a cheeky little monkey, that’s what you are!”

Remind me of the correct etiquette: do you pass the sick bag from left to right?

As long as we don’t get angry with them, that would be impolite; as long as good manners are maintained and we don’t mispronounce Jeremy Hunt’s surname. We will all be civilised about this, not get agitated about how uncivilised these thugs keep being. Meanwhile, metaphorically speaking, the whole cabinet continues to ride around on mopeds with their faces covered; they are going through red lights, mounting the pavement, doing wheelies and ripping handbags from the shoulders of the easiest targets. Theresa May should have a huge spider’s web tattoo on her neck; Boris Johnson should have a blond mohican and a studded leather jacket with “no future” written across the back. At least that would be more honest.

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